Book Image

Mastering Backbone.js

By : Abiee Echamea
Book Image

Mastering Backbone.js

By: Abiee Echamea

Overview of this book

Backbone.js is a popular library to build single page applications used by many start-ups around the world because of its flexibility, robustness and simplicity. It allows you to bring your own tools and libraries to make amazing webapps with your own rules. However, due to its flexibility it is not always easy to create scalable applications with it. By learning the best practices and project organization you will be able to create maintainable and scalable web applications with Backbone.js. With this book you will start right from organizing your Backbone.js application to learn where to put each module and how to wire them. From organizing your code in a logical and physical way, you will go on to delimit view responsibilities and work with complex layouts. Synchronizing models in a two-way binding can be difficult and with sub resources attached it can be even worse. The next chapter will explain strategies for how to deal with these models. The following chapters will help you to manage module dependencies on your projects, explore strategies to upload files to a RESTful API and store information directly in the browser for using it with Backbone.js. After testing your application, you are ready to deploy it to your production environment. The final chapter will cover different flavors of authorization. The Backbone.js library can be difficult to master, but in this book you will get the necessary skill set to create applications with it, and you will be able to use any other library you want in your stack.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
11
Index

Chapter 3. Model Bindings

Keeping models in sync with other objects such as views can be challenging, and if it is not done correctly, it can lead to messy code. In this chapter, we will explore how to deal with data synchronization to make data binding easier. But, what is data binding? Wikipedia defines data binding as:

Data binding is the process that establishes a connection between the application UI (User Interface) and business logic. If the settings and notifications are correctly set, the data reflects changes when made. It can also mean that when the UI is changed, the underlying data will reflect that change.

A common issue with model binding is how to deal with complex model structures that include other embedded objects or lists; in this chapter, we will define a strategy to deal with these scenarios. A missing feature in Backbone is two-way binding; in the next sections, we will see how to implement this without a headache.

Let's start the chapter describing how...